"Sculptor spins delicate, brilliant webs" by Joseph Gallivan (Portland Tribune)

Anna Skibska creates amazing feats of scale with tiny glass strands

Anna Skibska’s sculptures take some hanging. These intricate glass latticeworks are usually suspended from the ceiling by filament, such that with dramatic lighting, they hover and glow like ghostly diamond forms. They may be literal forms — a chair, a ladder — or abstract blobs that remind one of UFOs.

So she was surprised to hear that the owner of one of her pieces occasionally found bits that had fallen off of it on his living room floor.

“That means the balance wasn’t right!” she says by phone from her Seattle home.

The structures have an architectural feel. And they are not as fragile as you might think — touch them gently and they quiver and bounce rather than shatter.

Although an assistant does some of the glass stretching, Skibska has been unable to teach others how to weld together the 2 mm glass rods the way she likes it.

She’s had one residency at Bullseye — they developed the glass rods just for her, to save her stretching all the glass by hand — and this is her third show there.

She, too, has hit upon a way of making beauty, consistently. Her show, which opens at Bullseye this Friday and runs through July 29, consists of 16 pieces, lit spectacularly, and is called “No Exit.” This is a meditation on the idea that exits and entries are the same thing, seen from two different angles. (It’s partly inspired by the Greek myth of Theseus and the labyrinth.)

Skibska is French-German, born and raised in Poland, and speaks five languages. She has been in the United States for nearly nine years and retains her Polish accent.

“Glass artist” is too craftsy for her. She prefers sculptor working with glass. Her degrees are in architecture and painting. She was a painter until an epiphany when she saw a broken pane of glass by a trash bin in Poland. “The silver white edges reminded me of medieval silverpoint, which were the sterling silver pens used in medieval drawings before lead pencils. They left a specific, three-dimensional mark. And I thought, ‘This glass is a 3D drawing!’ ”

For a perfectionist, she has a great sense of humor.

“I’ve seen so many strange things. In one house they suspended a piece of my work just above the gas stove, so all the grease was directly on it.” She didn’t tell them what to do.

“I am not the perfect one. I have a Tomi Ungerer drawing, I know I’m supposed to keep it out of the light but I framed it because it gives me so much joy. It’s so beautiful I want to see it every day.”